Hair Apparent

"Everyone thought we were kinda nuts." Today, Sports Clips, whose cuts start at $15, is up to 331 stores nationwide, with plans to open another 150 in the next year. "We want guys to feel like Norm walking into ‘Cheers,’" Logan says. "And we're a no-appointment establishment, because we know guys don't wanna make appointments. They just wanna walk it and get it done on the way back from the Home Depot."

This attention to "what guys want" is at the heart of the barbershop revival. "We came into this as consumers," says Portman. "I'm a guy. I don't need the scented candles." What guys do need, or at least what they want, is the banter, the teasing and the male camaraderie that was an integral part of the local barbershop experience years ago but gradually slipped away. Of course, it never disappeared from the African-American community, where barbershops have earned such a hallowed place in the culture that entire movie franchises and reality TV shows have been built around them. "Cutting Edge," a recent HBO documentary about a busy Harlem barbershop, opens with a description of old school neighborhood shops calling them: "the nexus of all black male life: young, old and everything in between. Everyone else is just now catching up. "I started noticing it about two years ago," says Ron Brown, owner of the Austin-based Roffler School of Hair Design. "Guys are just tired of going to salons-and I'm sure women are probably glad they're gone. Guys want to go back to where the men are."

For this particular journalist, it's been more than 20 years since my last trip to a barbershop, and I have fond, if distant, memories of spending those visits talking sports, in particular my beloved New York Mets. (My barber back then, Pete, was also a fan.) These days, I'm a borderline "metrosexual," and in the eight years since I moved back to New York after college, my hair has been handled only by stylish gay men for about $40 a cut. Maybe it was time to go back to the barbershop and see what I've been missing? On the way home from the office one evening, I took a detour to the Park Slope Barber Shop in Brooklyn. The place, a classic joint on 7th Avenue, is run by the Fiumefreddo brothers-three of them-and it has been in the family since 1948. Angelo, who cut my hair, has been there 25 years himself. "It's not so painful if you don't think about the numbers," he said as I settled into his chair. The shop is so old-school that the phone number listed on the business cards has only seven digits-no area code. Talk about a neighborhood establishment.

I started to wince as the hair came off in bigger clumps than I'm accustomed to. But gradually, I settled down and took in the surroundings: Pictures of New York Yankee greats on every wall. A giant, vintage cash register in the back, still operational. Original leather barber chairs that came with the shop when it opened nearly a century ago. Eric Clapton and Eddie Money pouring in through crummy speakers, and the Fiumefreddo boys singing along to every song. Business, they agreed, has been good lately-better than a decade ago, though they're loath to guess why. Pretty soon, talk turned to baseball and I confessed my allegiance to the Mets. "Oh no," Angelo said with a smile. "Now I'm gonna have to mess up your hair." He let me off easy, though, and by the time I got up out of his chair, I was starting to rethink my allegiance to the pricier hair-stylists I've favored for so long. Then he said two words that sealed the deal: "Fifteen dollars." Fifteen ? Why did I ever stop going?

© 2006